What a second here! Isn’t that a contraction in terms? I mean, isn’t the very concept of socialism anathema to good American Christians of the Nationalist variety? The very worst term before the Berlin Wall fell was of course Communism. But since then, the ”C” word has taken a back seat to that awful “S” word. But don’t Christian Nationalists also tend to believe that a literate understanding of the Bible is required as the inerrant Word of God?
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In summer, 2024, the rector and a group of parishioners from St. John’s Episcopal Church, Boulder, Colorado, went on a 120-mile pilgrimage from Fatima, Portugal, site of the Marian visitations of 1917, to the Cathedral of St. James in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. By coincidence in 2017 Cedar, my wife, and I also did a 120-mile Camino pilgrimage to the same destination, but from a small town on the Castile-Galicia border in Spain: the so-called French versus the Portuguese Camino.
As a retired English professor who last had a science class—and it was physics—in his freshman year of college back in 1956-57, I am hardly one to claim scientific knowledge on this subject. But since 1962 to the present, I have had a series of five cats, with one exception all long-lived. So, my conclusions are all based on personal observation. Like humans, cats are individuals and have diverse personalities. Gender may also be a factor in their individuation. Still, there seem to be certain traits that they all have in common. So, my opinions expressed here are just that, based on what I’ve seen in my kitties over the years.
When we’re walking down the street, visiting a store, or out dining in our hometown, we’ll occasionally run into someone we know from a different context in our locale. For example, my wife and I go swimming three times a week in a water-fitness class at our local YMCA. If that person we “run into” happens to be from our class, the usual line is, “What are you doing here?” followed by something like “I almost didn’t recognize you with your clothes on!” It’s a pleasant enough meeting but it’s clearly just a coincidence. I reckon similar run-ins happen at least two or three times a year. But let me recount three meetings so unique and unlikely that I’ve always wondered, are they coincidences or miracles?
My parents were secular Jews. Consequently, I got little by way of religious instruction let alone acquaintance with the Bible at home. That really started at my then-American Baptist boarding school, Peddie. In those days, the early-to-mid 50s, we had required daily chapel, Sunday convocations or visits to local churches, and Sunday-evening vespers, which we boys referred to as “The Holy Hit Parade, since we could choose our favorite hymns to be sung: “Mr. Hicks, Number 114 please: ‘Day Is Dying in the West.’” Also required was a year-long religion course where we read a good piece of the Bible. In college I continued attending church, generally New Haven’s High Episcopal parish, Christ Church, and on occasion the University’s Chapel (Congregational), where the chaplains—the Rev. Sidney Lovett followed by the Rev. William Sloan Coffin—gave good-to-excellent sermons on the scriptures. Then, as an English major, I needed to review Bible passages relevant to the various literary works we were exploring.
Many of the world’s religions and a number of indigenous peoples have a belief in reincarnation. Mainstream Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do not. In fact, per the extensive article on the subject in Wikipedia, “The Catechism of the Catholic Church completely rejects any doctrine of reincarnation.” Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), an Italian philosopher and poet, was found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition for his belief in and dissemination of writings in support of the concept. By contrast, the Yoruba religion of Africa teaches that the divine Creator established reincarnation to bring about the “Good Condition” (Ipo Rere), or a balance between heaven and earth (Wikipedia). And a Pew 2009 survey found that at that time 22% of American Christians believed in reincarnation, while in a 1981 survey a startling 31% of regular churchgoing European Catholics did as well (Wikipedia).
Those of you who have been reading my blogs for a while know that I have had quite a religious pilgrimage. Born into a secular Jewish family, I originally received religious instruction from our African American housekeeper, Florine. She was a devout Methodist who attended weekly services at a local church in our New York City suburb of Great Neck. She would sing or hum hymns, tell me about Jesus, and invite me to listen with her to the George Beverley Shea Bible Hour on the radio. We’re talking here about the early 1940s. When I was in 7th grade—we were now living in the New York City suburb of Scarsdale—I spent a year in a Reform Jewish congregation and [sic!] Sunday School in nearby White Plains...
Altogether I have lived in Hawaii’s capital, Honolulu, for 17 of my 85 years, during the period of 1967 to 2007. For most of our time there, my wife and I belonged to Calvary by the Sea Lutheran Church in the district of Aina Haina. At one point four of us men congregants discovered that we were all born in 1939. So we established an informal 1939 Club and would do things together like occasionally going out for breakfast or lunch and sharing about our lives.
Thanks to a close relative who was recovering from alcoholism in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), I spent 20 extremely helpful years as a member of Al-Anon, the companion program for friends and families of alcoholics. It’s basically the same program, just with fewer practices meant specifically for recovering alcoholics. As it happens, besides the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions, generally read out loud at all 12 Step-related meetings, there are also the so-called 12 Slogans. They are all easily memorized and understood three-, four-, or five-worders, listed here. I’ll bet you already know a few: (1) One day at a time. (2) Live and let live. (3) How important is it? (4) Easy does it. (5) Go to any lengths. (6) Let it begin with me. (7) This too shall pass. (8) First things first. (9) Just for today. (10) Let go and let God. (11) Act as if. And (12) Progress not perfection.
Dear President-elect Trump,
First of all, congratulations on your election victory. This time you won both the electoral and the popular vote, and you won big. A special benefit of this definitive win is that there were no protests or violent incidents afterward, and we, your fellow Americans, are grateful. The Law of Retaliation, technically the Lex Talionis, Latin for the “Law of the Claw,” originated in ancient Babylon during the reign of King Hammurabi (1792-1750 BCE). Wikipedia describes Hammurabi’s Code as containing “282 laws . . . inscribed on a large stone stele and placed in a public place so that all could see them.” Most famous today from the Code is the phrase “an eye for an eye,” which limited revenge to so-called retributive, or balanced, justice. This concept appears as a commandment in Exodus 21:23-23, where Hammurabi’s phrase is used. Now scholars believe that this Old Testament book was not written until the 6th century BCE, some 1200 years later. However, if we look at Exodus 22, just one chapter later, we find verses like these: “When someone steals an ox or a sheep, and slaughters it or sells it, the thief shall pay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep” (NRSV, v. 1) or, in verse 7, “When someone delivers to a neighbor money or goods for safekeeping, and they are stolen from the neighbor’s house, then the thief, if caught, shall pay double.”
My dear fellow Americans,
By the time this mid-October blog is published, the United States will have a new or renewed President. So what I write here will have no bearing on the outcome of the November 5th Election. Still, I felt it important to share my thoughts with those of you who’ve voted for President Trump... The wonders of Nature are the wonders of Nature. I suppose they are not wonders to themselves. They’re just doing their everyday thing. They can be wonders to us if, as Jesus likes to say, we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. From time to time in the past, I have had my momentary oohs and aahs. But now, as I quickly approach my 85th birthday and my prospects of seeing those wonders for an open-ended time have become more consciously limited, I am paying more attention to what’s out there. And perhaps even more incredible than those things of natural beauty and competence themselves is my recurring question: How do they know how to do the breathtaking things they do?
Those of you who have been with me for a while know that “Reynold’s the name and wisdom’s the game.” Of course, wisdom is available in many forms, from proverbs to haikus to stories, whole books and plays. It is often the product of experience or even examples. As the French proverb suggests, “Children need examples, not sermons.” But sermons can also be the source of significant wisdom. In a past blog I shared some of my favorite proverbs from Cynthia Voelke’s and my 1992 book, A World Treasury of Folk Wisdom. In this volume we collected 1,000 proverbs from more than a hundred countries. These maxims were divided into 100 categories of ten selections each. Not more than one proverb from a single nation or culture was permitted per category. Today I am sharing personal favorites from a collection not of proverbs but quotations found in Shelley Tucker’s Openings—Quotations on Spirituality in Everyday Life (1997). Her book is divided into 41 categories. And in this context I can offer a personal definition of proverbs as quotations that have lost their authors and become common cultural or social property. So, without further ado, here’s my selection. See if you can figure out their categories.
Now we’ve all heard of Rumi. That is, Jalal al-Din Muhammad, the Mevlana or Master (1207-1273), the Persian-born poet, scholar, and mystic. His Sufi order, or lineage, is known as the Medlevis, or more familiarly, the Whirling Dervishes. There is even a contemporary American offshoot called MOA, the Medlevi Order of America. I should know since a married couple, friends of mine in Hawaii, are leaders of the Order there and, yes, they can both whirl. Rumi, as he is commonly known, has had much of his written wisdom translated into English and no doubt into many other languages. His longest work is a 50,000-line poem, The Masnavi, considered “the Quran in Persian,” which instructs Sufis and others on how to come into the love of God. He got the name Rumi, by the way, from the place where he lived, worked, and died in southwestern Turkey. The city, Konya, was considered in its day the Rome of Turkey, in Turkish “Rum.” Hence, as someone closely associated with that place, he became known as “Rumi,” literally “Roman.” Among his many famous sayings, one of my favorites is—“Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
My Word program redlined me on the last word of this blog’s title. Oh well, I guess I just brought a new word into existence. The concept to be sure is older than the hills. The Jehovah presented in the Hebrew Scriptures is nothing if not transactional. Look at all I’ve done for you, “He” seems to be saying. Not only have I created the whole world and filled it with plants and animals to help and sustain you, but I’ve created you. Now it’s your turn to do whatever I want you to do, and woe be unto you if you fail me. You’ll get it from me in spades...
Maybe I’m just a masochist. You see, I spent three years in my Lutheran days participating in the Bethel Bible Series. To gain your diploma you spent two years studying the Old Testament—the less judgmental term is the “Hebrew Scriptures”—followed by a final year studying the New. Then, more recently, as an Episcopalian, I did the four-year Education for Ministry (EfM) Program put together by theologians at the Episcopal Seminary in Sewanee, Tennessee. Here we covered the Old Testament in Year 1, the New in Year 2, history of the Christian religion in Year 3, and theology in Year 4. At the end I received a frameable diploma from the University of the South on behalf of its School of Theology implying that I was now an educated lay minister. (Consider Luther’s statement about “the priesthood of all believers.”) But here’s where the masochism comes in. Our Episcopal parish, St. John’s in Boulder, Colorado, has now offered a program whereby participants read the entire Bible in 365 days. And guess who joined the 79 other parishioners in this so-called Bible Challenge: Me!
All religions, I suspect, have an inner as well as an outer aspect: an esoteric and an exoteric side. But I was surprised that Islam, such a straightlaced and serious-seeming faith, would have a lighter side, personified in part by a legendary—and possibly a real-life—character known as the Mullah Nasrudin. Associated primarily with Turkey, as was the mystic Rumi, the Mullah is often pictured as riding backwards on his mule (See below.). His reason: So he could see where he was coming from...
Born in New York City on November 6, 1939, I was the third generation of Jewish Americans in my family. All four of my grandparents had arrived in the United States in the last decade of the 19th century: two from Belarus, one from the Ukraine, and one from Romania. Three of them were Ashkenazim, or German Jews, while the fourth, my paternal grandfather from Romania, was a Sephardi, or Spanish Jew. Both my parents were non-religious. My father had had the strict Orthodox version of the religion beaten into him as a boy. So once a man, he remained an ethnic Jew from Brooklyn but would have nothing to do with the religion. My mother, a farmer’s daughter and the eldest girl among eleven children, came from a non-religious family and stayed that way until her death at 95. Consequently, my encounters with the Jewish faith were mainly through periodic visits to my paternal grandmother, the daughter of a Jewish official and a rigorously faithful Orthodox Jew. When my 13th birthday approached, she apparently had told my father that if “the boy” were not bar-mitzphahed, she would curse Dad from her deathbed. I was totally unprepared. So, my father bribed Grandma’s rabbi, who in effect did my part in the ritual. Oy!
My wife and I watch so little TV that we might be liable to be exiled by a future national government as un-American. Of course, we hope that such a government will be soundly thumped in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. A landslide of that kind would do the heart and soul as well as the country good. So, getting to our viewing habits: First, most of it takes place on Rocky Mountain PBS. To be sure, even public television has in recent years supplemented its periodic fundraising drives with actual commercials. And viewing ads on commercial television is a major turnoff for us. Thanks to the legacy of the individual the Sesame Street characters referred to as Alistair Cookie Monster, we generally limit ourselves to shows on Masterpiece. Besides that, I’ve been watching the PBS News Hour from what seems like its very beginning, going back to MacNeil- Lehrer. Nowadays I generally limit myself to the 20-minute news summary, to leave psychological room for 50 minutes of Grantchester or All Creatures Great and Small...
To date I have written and had published five books on practical wisdom. My favorite, which at number three falls exactly in the middle, is Wising Up—A Youth Guide to Good Living. Co-authored with M. Jan Rumi, it was published in 2007 by Cowley Publications, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. It is a collection of 80 one-page essays, each with an opening quotation, a good-living principle, and three optional journal or school exercises. Sample essay titles include Go for It!, Wait a Minute!, Stay the Course, Never Say Never, Don’t Boss Others Around, Choose Friends Wisely, Laugh, and Dance. Our final words to our readers are “Best wishes as you take your place in the world. By applying the principles in this book, you should be able to live a truly good life: one that fulfills your dreams while enriching those around you, including Mother Earth.” I am especially proud of the fact that my co-author and I represent all three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as two diverse nations, the United States and Bangladesh...
Big-question time! So why are were here, living on Planet Earth? What’s it all about, Alfie? Beware of anyone who claims they really know. Any answer in the end is pure speculation. Still, it’s fun to speculate. So read along with me. Let’s see what we may see.
As an educator, I’ve often thought of the Planet as a kind of school where we’re supposed to learn to become our biggest and best selves while helping the human race in whatever small ways to evolve into a peaceful, harmonious, mutually helpful family. It’s a John Deweyan form of education, where we learn by doing. Any mistake so long as it’s not fatal to ourselves or others can help us along the path. In this regard, I think the Hindu-Buddhist concept of reincarnation makes sense, since not many of us are likely to become fully noble human beings during one lifetime, unless, that is, we have filed down many rough spots in previous lives. In education this sort of “keep at it till you’ve got it” approach is known as mastery learning. It’s in line with the saying that if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again... If you want to score with a bestseller, write about your near-death experiences (NDE’s). Of course, you have to have some first and be a halfway decent writer. Along with UFO encounters, NDEs command near-universal interest and attention. After all, to quote Shakespeare, death is that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns” (Hamlet, III, I, 90-91) All travelogues will be highly esteemed...
This blog is a companion piece to the one titled “From Me-dom to WE-dom.” In fact, it discusses one of the major ways we can live in a “WE” versus a “me” mindset. So fasten your seatbelts for a minute or two, and here we go.
The term significant other,” or S.O. for short, is usually reserved for one’s partner or sweetie. Of course, for better or worse, the people who raise us and the list of other important people in our lives, from special teachers, coaches, ministers, relatives besides our parents, to close friends may also merit the term. My point here, however, is that we should consider everyone we encounter as at least potential S.O.s and relate to them accordingly. What’s the line? Many a time we have been visited by angels unaware. The story of how Abraham and Sarah showed hospitality to the three men who turned out in fact to be angels (Genesis 18:1-15) is illustrative here. A modern equivalent for us might be, treat your seatmate on an airplane with courtesy and respect, for you don’t know who he or she may turn out to be... The other title I thought of, given my hours of watching the now-concluded Paris Olympics, was “WE, WE, Monsieur!” In either case, in light of the Olympics’ modeling of friendly competition amongst sometimes hostile nations, a critical mass of humankind now needs to embrace a broader, more inclusive view of our global world. From my perspective, the most important race to be won is the human one. That’s why, in this age of self-definition through the use of personal pronouns, I have been giving mine as He-Him-WE, with the capitalization of “we” hinting at where I am going with this thought...
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